"I do not feel well enough. Besides,
there's my work." "You can't see to sew with these red eyes," he
declared. "Come! I prescribe a drive, as your physician."
"Oh, Ernest, how kind, how forgiving you are?", I cried, running into
the arms he held out to me, "If you knew how ashamed, how sorry, I
am!"
"And if you only knew how ashamed and sorry I am!" he returned. "I
ought to have seen how you taxing and over-taxing yourself, doing
your work and Martha's too. It must not go on so."
By this time, with a veil over my face, he had got me downstairs and
out into the air, which fanned my fiery cheeks and cooled my heated
brain. It seemed to me that I have had all this tempest about nothing
at all, and that with a character still so undisciplined, I was
utterly unworthy to be either a wife or a mother. But when I tried to
say so in broken words, Ernest comforted me with the gentleness and
tenderness of a woman.
"Your character is not undisciplined, my darling," he said. "Your
nervous organization is very peculiar, and you have had unusual cares
and trials from the beginning of our married life. I ought not to
have confronted you with my father's debts at a moment when you had
every reason to look forward to freedom from most petty economies and
cares."
"Don't say so," I interrupted. "If you had not told me you had this
draft on your resources I should have always suspected you of
meanness.
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